Dear readers,
I am pleased to present issue 9.2 of Studies in American Humor. Once again, we have an issue that represents the breadth of work being done in American humor studies, with essays focusing on poetry, drama, late-night television, and film comedy. The work in this issue also demonstrates that scholarship on American humor is not only being created by scholars working in the United States, as we have two pieces from scholars out of Europe.
First up is Sarah Shermyen’s “Reading Gertrude Stein for Pleasure: Finding the ‘Mere Humor’ in ‘High Modernism.’” Shermyen offers an analysis of Stein’s seemingly impenetrable poem “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” However, rather than offering a traditional literary analysis, Shermyen focuses on the poem’s playfulness and teases out the ways in which its use of sound and repetition may generate laughter for readers. Next, Mark Hama explores the...
